"Smirched!...
"You see, dear, one IS passionately anxious for something—what is it? One wants to be CLEAN. You want me to be clean. You would want me to be clean, if you gave me a thought, that is....
"I wonder if you give me a thought....
"I'm not a good woman. I don't mean I'm not a good woman—I mean that I'm not a GOOD woman. My poor brain is so mixed, dear, I hardly know what I am saying. I mean I'm not a good specimen of a woman. I've got a streak of male. Things happen to women—proper women—and all they have to do is to take them well. They've just got to keep white. But I'm always trying to make things happen. And I get myself dirty...
"It's all dirt that washes off, dear, but it's dirt.
"The white unaggressive woman who corrects and nurses and serves, and is worshipped and betrayed—the martyr-queen of men, the white mother.... You can't do that sort of thing unless you do it over religion, and there's no religion in me—of that sort—worth a rap.
"I'm not gentle. Certainly not a gentlewoman.
"I'm not coarse—no! But I've got no purity of mind—no real purity of mind. A good woman's mind has angels with flaming swords at the portals to keep out fallen thoughts....
"I wonder if there are any good women really.
"I wish I didn't swear. I do swear. It began as a joke.... It developed into a sort of secret and private bad manners. It's got to be at last like tobacco-ash over all my sayings and doings....
"'Go it, missie,' they said; "kick aht!'
"I swore at that policeman—and disgusted him. Disgusted him!
"Damn! Things are getting plainer. It must be the dawn creeping in.
"Oh, sleep! Sleep! Sleep! Sleep!"
Part 2
"Now," said Ann Veronica, after the half-hour of exercise, and sitting on the uncomfortable wooden seat without a back that was her perch by day, "it's no good staying here in a sort of maze. I've got nothing to do for a month but think. I may as well think. I ought to be able to think things out.
"How shall I put the question? What am I? What have I got to do with myself?...
"I wonder if many people HAVE thought things out?
"Are we all just seizing hold of phrases and obeying moods?
"It wasn't so with old-fashioned people, they knew right from wrong; they had a clear-cut, religious faith that seemed to explain everything and give a rule for everything. We haven't. I haven't, anyhow. And it's no good pretending there is one when there isn't.... I suppose I believe in God.... Never really thought about Him—people don't.. .. I suppose my creed is, 'I believe rather indistinctly in God the Father Almighty, substratum of the evolutionary process, and, in a vein of vague sentimentality that doesn't give a datum for anything at all, in Jesus Christ, His Son.'...
"It's no sort of good, Ann Veronica, pretending one does believe when one doesn't....
"And as for praying for faith—this sort of monologue is about as near as any one of my sort ever gets to prayer. Aren't I asking—asking plainly now?...
"We've all been mixing our ideas, and we've got intellectual hot coppers—every blessed one of us....
"A confusion of motives—that's what I am!...
"There is this absurd craving for Mr. Capes—the 'Capes crave,' they would call it in America. Why do I want him so badly? Why do I want him, and think about him, and fail to get away from him?
"It isn't all of me.
"The first person you love, Ann Veronica, is yourself—get hold of that! The soul you have to save is Ann Veronica's soul...."
She knelt upon the floor of her cell and clasped her hands, and remained for a long time in silence.
"Oh, God!" she said at last, "how I wish I had been taught to pray!"
Part 3
She had some idea of putting these subtle and difficult issues to the chaplain when she was warned of his advent. But she had not reckoned with the etiquette of Canongate. She got up, as she had been told to do, at his appearance, and he amazed her by sitting down, according to custom, on her stool. He still wore his hat, to show that the days of miracles and Christ being civil to sinners are over forever. She perceived that his countenance was only composed by a great effort, his features severely compressed. He was ruffled, and his ears were red, no doubt from some adjacent controversy. He classified her as he seated himself.
"Another young woman, I suppose," he said, "who knows better than her Maker about her place in the world. Have you anything to ask me?"
Ann Veronica readjusted her mind hastily. Her back stiffened. She produced from the depths of her pride the ugly investigatory note of the modern district visitor. "Are you a special sort of clergyman," she said, after a pause, and looking down her nose at him, "or do you go to the Universities?"
"Oh!" he said, profoundly.
He panted for a moment with unuttered replies, and then, with a scornful gesture, got up and left the cell.
So that Ann Veronica was not able to get the expert advice she certainly needed upon her spiritual state.
Part 4
After a day or so she thought more steadily. She found herself in a phase of violent reaction against the suffrage movement, a phase greatly promoted by one of those unreasonable objections people of Ann Veronica's temperament take at times—to the girl in the next cell to her own. She was a large, resilient girl, with a foolish smile, a still more foolish expression of earnestness, and a throaty contralto voice. She was noisy and hilarious and enthusiastic, and her hair was always abominably done. In the chapel she sang with an open-lunged gusto that silenced Ann Veronica altogether, and in the exercising-yard slouched round with carelessly dispersed feet. Ann Veronica decided that "hoydenish ragger" was the only phrase to express her. She was always breaking rules, whispering asides, intimating signals. She became at times an embodiment for Ann Veronica of all that made the suffrage movement defective and unsatisfying.
She was always initiating petty breaches of discipline. Her greatest exploit was the howling before the mid-day meal. This was an imitation of the noises made by the carnivora at the Zoological Gardens at feeding-time; the idea was taken up by prisoner after prisoner until the whole place was alive with barkings, yappings, roarings, pelican chatterings, and feline yowlings, interspersed with shrieks of hysterical laughter. To many in that crowded solitude it came as an extraordinary relief. It was better even than the hymn-singing. But it annoyed Ann Veronica.
"Idiots!" she said, when she heard this pandemonium, and with particular reference to this young lady with the throaty contralto next door. "Intolerable idiots!..."